Mayor Rahm Emanuel brought in Attorney General Eric Holder Wednesday to help make the case that Chicago Public Schools students were safer during the recent academic year than they were before Emanuel made the controversial decision to close dozens of schools.

Emanuel's school policies are certain to take center stage during his upcoming re-election bid, given the resentment in many neighborhoods where schools were closed last year and the promise by the Chicago Teachers Union to target the mayor for defeat.

At a round-table style meeting at Chicago Police headquarters, Holder applauded the “really amazing reductions in the kinds of negative behaviors and negative outcomes” among Chicago elementary and high school students.

“I don’t think that this community, this mayor, the leaders from this community get enough credit for it,” said Holder, who served with Emanuel in President Barack Obama’s administration.

Emanuel's administration released statistics he said showed this school year was “the safest on record” —which means since the city began tracking violence involving students in 2007.

According to the city, 24 CPS students were victims of homicide during the 2013-2014 school year, from last September to June. While that is 12 fewer than in 2012-2013, when 36 CPS students were homicide victims, it is just three fewer than the 27 students who were killed in each of the previous two school years , according to city statistics.

Additionally, the number of CPS students shot in the most recent school year fell to 191 from 236 the prior year and 304 in 2011-2012, according to the Emanuel administration.

Those statistics cannot be verified because for the past several years CPS has not released information on student shootings and homicides in the aftermath of those crimes.

At Wednesday’s event, Emanuel touted several school programs that he often highlights for helping decrease violence, among them the Becoming A Man mentoring program for high-risk students, which operates in a handful of district schools.

He pointed to ongoing CPS efforts to move away from suspensions and expulsions. The move to keep kids in school, which began before Emanuel took office, was cited by the mayor as another way to keep kids safe instead of sending them down a path toward dropping out and crime.

“It’s about an approach, and a different philosophy that ensured that we weren’t actually defaulting to a position of expulsion first, but actually of expulsion last, and how to keep kids in school, how to handle a situation with a different approach and with the ultimate goal of keeping our kids on track to graduation,” Emanuel said.

Emanuel also talked about the success of Safe Passage, a program he threw his weight behind last year as a way to try to prevent students from falling victim to violence on their way to and from class. Parents whose neighborhood schools Emanuel closed last fall worried their children would face trouble getting to new schools, so the city paid people to stand on street corners and increased patrols by police and other city workers along designated “Safe Passage routes.”

On Wednesday, Emanuel said he would beef up Safe Passage again next year with an additional $1 million investment by the school district.

Emanuel contrasted Holder’s Wednesday visit with the attorney general’s 2009 trip to Chicago in the wake of the videotaped beating death of Fenger High School student Derrion Albert.

“The attorney general was here at my request,” Emanuel told reporters after Holder left. “I said if you came to Chicago I think you would see and hear of the progress we’re making adopting a lot of strategies and approaches.”

Following Wednesday’s event, the Chicago Teachers Union said in a statement that there’s “a serious disconnect” between the administration’s report on school safety and what’s actually happening in schools

“You can't appropriately deal with disciplinary infractions and behavior issues without social workers, counselors, etc., and instead of expanding those positions, they are cutting them — making schools less safe and secure for students and staff,” the union said.